The Cartographers’ Guild is a forum created by and for map makers and aficionados, a place where every aspect of cartography can be admired, examined, learned, and discussed. Our membership consists of professional designers and artists, hobbyists, and amateurs—all are welcome to join and participate in the quest for cartographic skill and knowledge.

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Hello everybody

Dear members of the Cartographers' Guild,

I am a 31-years old Hungarian guy. I always liked drawing maps, but it has remained a pure hobby for me. My appearance is simply coincidental here, I have been just browsing around in order to find some map-generating algorithms: to be honest, my main area of interest is computer-generated realistic maps. Although, my family and my job requires some time on my side, so my presence here might be not too frequent.

I wrote my own small programs to generate maps by fractal and other algorithms, but I am currently interested in the GIMP, mainly because its free-of charge nature and scripting capabilities. I also tried the Fractal Terrains demo, its projection features are amazing (in spite of this, terrain generation functions of it seemed somewhat limited), maybe I will by it in the future.

And I have almost forgotten, of course I have been playing also with Wilbur. (Steel General and Redrobes, thanks for reminding me )

Best regards,

czakolaci

Last edited by czakolaci; 09-15-2009 at 09:53 AM.
Reason: I forgot to mention Wilbur...

Welcome, there is my GeoTerSys for eye candy as a link in my sig. Its not released but you can look anyways. Also look at L3DT, GeoControl, WorldMachine, Vue, Terragen, GlobalMapper, Leveller and yeah Wilbur is definitely worth a play with.

Theres another free and simple terrain generator on my ViewingDale site under the free utilities section. Its called Instant Islands and it has a complementary and free viewer for it Dragon Flight too.

One of my map generating codes is in Visual Basic, but basically it is a plasma texture generating algorithm which is extensively used by some programs, even by Photoshop, the GIMP etc. I also wrote an algorithm with a different approach (if I remember well in Turbo Pascal under DOS) which can be more important as it uses some seeds of different size and growing them in order to create a continent.

Some examples will be also presented soon, but I have currently no access to my home PC.

@Steel General and Redrobes:

Thanks for reminding me, of course I have tried Wilbur. Also thanks for the recommended programs, I plan to try to check at least an evaluation version of them. I am thinking about the "continental drift" issue, but a realistic and relatively fast simulation of it seems a bit complex... surprisingly, I haven't found a program which has this feature! Which is quite odd, because the stone-age old program SimEarth did some kind of that...